Tradition Read online

  That last one pissed me off the most because I’d been the one to show him how to get there. I’d taken photos from the roof, and he’d liked the photos, supposedly, and wanted to see how I’d taken them, but we’d barely been up there two minutes before we were on our backs, rolling over each other, making out. In fact, I could have swapped Gillian’s name out of any of those stories, because Ethan and I had already done all those things together, we just hadn’t told anybody about it—or, I hadn’t.

  But that’s how a place like this works. Rumors become stories. Stories become the truth. And we live by the lies we believe—at least until the actual reality becomes overwhelming. Then what?

  CHAPTER 7

  * * *

  JAMES BAXTER

  Even though the football season had already started and it was clear to the rest of the world I wasn’t going to join the team, Freddie wouldn’t stop. For real, Buckeye, get your ass in action. You were born for this shit. You’d be out here crushing people. Thing is, he had no idea how much he sounded like all the guys back home. Coach Drucker, too. My dad. Get out there, boy. Hit-hit-hit—nice hit!

  “Hey,” Freddie said, pulling me aside in the mathematics building after classes ended. It was only a week into school, and I was still blinded by the fog of equations from class. I was half walking, half stumbling down the hall. Freddie steadied me at the elbow. “We don’t have practice today,” he said, talking about football again. “Come by the bleachers at four.”

  I rolled my eyes. “You won’t give up.”

  “Nope.” He grinned. “But it’s better than you think. I have a surprise for you.”

  A guy like me, a guy my size, isn’t supposed to be scared, but I was. I didn’t want to be down by the field, but I didn’t want to keep avoiding it either. Coach O’Leary had been bugging me that I should meet with him once a week, make a plan for getting in shape and being ready for hockey season, and I’d already begged off my first meeting, claiming I needed time to adjust to my classes. That wasn’t a lie. I wasn’t sure how the hell I was going to pass any of my courses, but also, I just couldn’t get into the swing of training yet. It had been so long.

  So I should have known, when Freddie told me he had a surprise, that Coach O’Leary would be a part of it. They stood side by side against the fence between the track and the sidelines of the football field. “Got to hand it to the Buckeye,” Freddie said to Coach when I reached them. “The guy’s punctual.”

  Coach O nodded. “The Buckeye. I like it.” He dropped a hand on my shoulder and walked all three of us down the track, away from the football field. “Look,” he told me. “We don’t normally do this, but I talked to Patterson, and we just have to make an exception this year.” Freddie bobbed his head enthusiastically. “The rink is operational year-round anyway, just have to adjust a few things here and there to keep other parts of the building open. So here’s the plan.” He pointed up the low rise toward the hockey rink. “Twice a week I want Freddie working you on the ice. We’ll get you on a weights-and-cardio schedule too, maybe loop you in with the football team’s schedule, we’ll see, but first and foremost, let’s get you back on the ice.” He cocked an eyebrow. “After all, it’s been a while.”

  Freddie held up a hand. A set of keys dangled from his forefinger. “And I have this,” he said.

  Coach turned to him. “And if you abuse this privilege in any way, I’ll break your fingers.” He liked to talk like that, adopting a slight shift in his voice, as if he was a gangster in a movie and wearing a three-piece suit, not a windbreaker over a shirt and tie.

  He ushered us on without me saying much to agree. What was I going to say anyway? That was the whole point of me being there. I knew I was supposed to feel grateful, and I did, but I also couldn’t help feeling like they’d bought me and I owed them. Scholarship kid. Full-ride kid. I owed them fifty thousand dollars or a trophy.

  Freddie let us in the back door that led straight to the locker rooms, dug out some practice equipment, and we were out on the ice in no time. I got my bearings zipping around the rink for a while, picking up speed, cutting left and right, short hops, pivots. I didn’t have my pads on at first, only the skates, helmet, and gloves, and Freddie came up behind me and leveled me against the boards.

  He laughed as I picked myself up. “You have a long way to go,” he said.

  “Damn.” I looked around, and even though the arena was dim and only half-lit, the seats empty, and I was chilled to the bone without the full uniform and pads, I couldn’t help but smile. I took a deep breath. “Damn,” I repeated. “It feels so good to be out here.”

  “I knew you’d love this,” he said. “Come on, man, let’s get you suited up. I’ll drag out a net.”

  A couple minutes later, I was clipped into a full suit of goalie pads and hunched down in the net. Freddie took shot after shot. I missed the first few.

  “Thought you were supposed to be a secret weapon,” he teased. He kept at it, lining up the pucks and slapping them at me, faster and faster, and it didn’t take long for the muscle memory to kick in. After the first few misses, it took him a while to sneak one by me.

  “That’s what I’m talking about, Buckeye.”

  He rushed the net with the last puck on his line, and I swiveled into position for the hit. He faked and crept closer, and just as he was about to take the shot, I sprang at him and took him out. He didn’t have any pads on at all, not even a mask, and he slid across the ice on his back. For a second he said nothing, and my stomach dropped. A thousand nightmares rained through my mind and I was about to shout his name, when I heard him start to laugh.

  “The hell?” He crouched on his knees. “Yes!” he yelled. “Yes, yes, yes!” He bounced back up onto his skates and zipped over. He threw an arm around me. “Dude,” he said. “Twice a week. Fuck football.” He knocked his forehead against my mask. He knocked again. I tore off my helmet and pressed my forehead against his. “You and me,” he went on. “We’re taking home the cup. You and me, man.” He tipped his head to the ceiling, and roared. “Hell, yes!”

  I growled along with him, feeling the warm rumble explode within me. Even if it was only for a minute, it felt like I was home, or the closest thing to it, the thing I missed most, a sense of peace and belonging.

  But it didn’t take long for the feeling to pass, for the worry to creep back in, for me to remember that I was the fifty-thousand-dollar kid and I didn’t belong. It wasn’t just that hockey was the only reason I’d been given a chance at Fullbrook. I didn’t understand why I’d been given the life there at all—I didn’t know why I should have been.

  • • •

  The previous year, near the end of the football season, we had had only three games left to play. Vinny Dawson had been averaging 250 passing yards a game. He had all the looks from Oklahoma State, USC, Alabama, and the Fighting Irish. He could run, find his way out of the pocket and not lose yardage, but mostly, he could throw. We had a Friday night game that week, away at Bucksfield. We were all confident we could maintain our perfect season. We just had to keep our offensive line sharp. Bucksfield had a terrible offense, but they had the best defense in the league. Except for me. I led the league in sacks.

  My job, mostly, was to break the opposing team’s line and scare the living hell out of their QB. Attack, attack, attack. Breakfast! I yelled all game, calling over the line to the QB. Breakfast, you ready? I did it every game. I had my target, and I knew my job was to keep his ass in the dirt where it belonged. Breakfast! I shouted. I’m coming for you. Eat you up and shit you out right back in the grass. Come on! One more time, baby! Coach Ellerly loved it. Hit-hit-hit, Jamie! he yelled from the sidelines. Hit-hit-hit, everyone yelled, cheering me on. Hit-hit-hit was the mantra shouting in the back of my mind, a deafening roar.

  At practice on Thursday, before the Bucksfield game, I was doing my game-time routine. This time scaring the hell out of my own teammates. “Come on, now,” I shouted at the offensive line. “You better
stop me. Bucksfield’s coming for you tomorrow.”

  Time and again they didn’t. I broke free and got two clean hits on Vinny in a row. On the third one, Vinny just slid into the dirt so I’d only tag him. “Christ, Jamie,” he said when I rolled off him.

  “Don’t get pissed at me,” I said. “Bucksfield’s coming for you.”

  Vinny ran over to Coach, and after they talked, they made some adjustments to the line. They stopped me a few times in a row. Vinny made two completions. They got a run by me, and then another. “Come on, Jamie!” Coach yelled from the sidelines. “Keep on them. Keep on them. Nobody holds you back. Keep on them. Hit-hit-hit.”

  “We got this,” Vinny said in the huddle. I could hear him from where I was. “We got this. Hell, yeah!” someone else shouted.

  But I chanted my own phrase in my head. I got this. Something in me just knew. I got this. I got this! I was so pumped I was hopping on the balls of my feet. I clapped along with everyone else when they broke from the huddle with a roar. Back on the line, knuckles in the grass, I looked at the two guys in front of me and let them know I was going to beat them both.

  “We got this,” Paul Sikes said to me, his grill inches from mine.

  “I’m about to chew the fuck out of you,” I growled back. I spat a litany of things I’ll never repeat for the rest of my life, and he cowered and stared down into the dirt. When Vinny called for the ball, I smashed Sikes so hard and plowed him so far to the left, he lost his footing and flipped backward. I couldn’t hear anything except my own deafening roar blaring in my ears. I shouldered someone else to the side and gunned it for Vinny with such ferocity, my whole mind went blank, like a flash of lightning ignited behind my eyes.

  I climbed up off the grass and looked around. The sound poured back into my brain, and I heard a few shouts. Whistles blew. I heard my name. And Vinny’s. Screams.

  For some reason, I didn’t look down. I just saw Heather and the cheerleaders on the track, looking at me over the chain-link fence. Heather had her hands up to her mouth. Other girls were yelling around her, but she was silent, staring at me in a way I’d never seen.

  Vinny wasn’t getting up. He was a few feet away from me, face-first in the grass, not moving, not twitching. His body was twisted like a doll’s, his waist and legs bent improbably to the side. For a moment, in a hushed lull, as he lay alone, with everyone else scattered across the field, he looked dead. He nearly was.

  But then the whistles blew again and people started screaming from the sidelines. Coach Ellerly stormed the field with his team of assistants, and a swarm of players surrounded him. “What the hell is the matter with you?” Coach shouted, shaking my shoulder.

  Vinny was out cold, but breathing. When the paramedics arrived, they were careful getting him onto the stretcher. As the ambulance pulled away, I kept thinking it was a dream, that it wasn’t happening, because I’d always thought Vinny was invincible, that we all were, actually. That every time Coach yelled Hit, and every time the crowd cheered when I stuffed somebody in the dirt, and every time my teammates roared when we sacked another quarterback, it was all just a part of the game and the game was everything, but also only a game.

  The ambulance, the people yelling in my face, none of it seemed real.

  “What the hell were you doing?”

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  “You could have killed him.”

  Vinny lived, but I’d broken his back, and delivered such a serious concussion, Vinny didn’t return to school. His football career was over. Nobody held back. Not Coach, not our friends, not my teachers, not Vinny, not his family. It was unanimous. I’d ruined his life.

  When Heather and I had been dating, she’d always reminded me of the many things in her life a white boy like me couldn’t understand, and I’d always been a little worried it was going to be something I was ignorant about that would do us in—not something I actually excelled at instead. Because even before Heather stopped returning my texts, there’d been that day in the hall, the week after that practice. I’d walked toward her, hoping she’d hold me like she used to. But instead, she’d backed away. “I don’t even know,” she said, her voice shaky. I reached for her. “Don’t touch me,” she snapped. She pointed to my hands. “I don’t understand how you can just break a person like that.”

  I didn’t know how or why either—I just knew I could.

  I kept going to school, kept trying to find a way to graduate, until the day I was walking into the pharmacy to get Mom some medicine, because she was laid out at home with the flu. I wandered up and down the aisle for a bit, but since I was never the one to actually buy the stuff, I had no clue what the best one was for her. It dawned on me the pharmacist would know, but as I went around the last aisle to wait in line for him, I nearly bumped into Vinny’s mom. The little plastic bag in her hand was loaded with orange pill bottles. I went rigid and silent, unable to meet her eye. “I’m sorry,” I said, but it was nothing more than a whisper of dust, lost in the air between us.

  She caught me gawking at the bag of bottles. “Don’t you dare,” she mumbled. Trembling, she stuck a finger out toward me. “You shouldn’t be here,” she said. “I shouldn’t have to see you—ever again.” She braced herself with a breath, then leaned closer. “You’re a monster.”

  I didn’t know what to say; she was right.

  That was it. I barely made it to school from then on. I skipped hockey. I closed all my accounts. No Insta, Snap. Nothing. I couldn’t look at them. Here’s me in the park—skipping class. Here’s me in the mall, mugging behind a security guard. Here’s me standing upside down on someone else’s mattress. No. What was I going to do? Here’s me at the hospital, looking through the window at the guy whose life I ruined. Here’s me on the toilet at school. Not using it, just sitting in the only room where no one will stare at you as if you are a criminal. That was exactly how I felt that fall—criminal, and worse, one who’d gotten away with it.

  Only Coach Drucker, my hockey coach, came back around. Months later, after I’d missed the whole season. I was special, so I got another chance. Vinny wasn’t dead, but he wasn’t living the life he’d set out for. He was improvising, trying to make the most of it back home, working the cash register at a Papa John’s, where they’d lowered the counter to make it easier for him to work in a wheelchair. I was picking up where I’d left off. I’d gotten a do-over, as if what I’d done had never happened at all.

  But it had.

  And now I was out there in the world, going to class again, hanging out with people again, laying down the foundation for the future I was told I was supposed to have. But really, deep down, all I wanted was to be a guy who knew how to do the right thing.

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  JULES DEVEREUX

  I felt pretty on top of my college applications. I had my list. I was powering through the essays. I’d have drafts of everything finished by the end of the week, and it was only mid-September. So it was all worth celebrating over a huge mound of ice cream in the student center.

  Vanilla with chocolate sprinkles and crushed Oreos, chocolate syrup, whipped cream, and that nasty cherry on top, which looks better than it tastes. I ate that first to get it out of the way. But I hadn’t been sitting for five minutes when a group of guys sat down at the long table against the back wall and started talking over each other. They made so much noise I had to keep cranking my headphones, until it just wasn’t worth it anymore because the volume was making my own ears hum with pain. I turned off the music and tried to hurry through my ice cream instead. No peace.

  Freddie was in the center, and I realized he had the most recent student handbook in front of him. He pointed to it and looked up, over his shoulder, to the Buckeye. “Now, that is a good page.” The other guys behind them laughed along in agreement. The Buckeye too.

  “Am I right, though?” Freddie asked him.

  “Yeah, yeah, I guess so,” he said, more enthusiastically, nodding, m
outh open like a Venus flytrap. He glanced toward me, and I burned him with a glare.

  Freddie had a pen in one hand. “What do we think? 7?” He pointed to the page with his pen. “An 8? And another 8? And definitely a 9 or 10 here, right?” The guys continued to argue over the numbers: They were rating the first-year girls by their head shots in the student handbook. These assholes rubbed me the wrong way so bad, it actually hurt my body—like the sting of skin burning.

  Every year Fullbrook issued each student a new and updated handbook. A binder full of rules and regulations that nobody read or even looked at. But at the back, on the last ten pages, were high-gloss black-and-white photographs of all the first years. The idea was that the rest of us would look at the photos and get to know the students’ names, get to know who they were, so when we passed them on the walkway or in the student center, or wherever, we could say hi, and maybe even say their names. Make them feel at home.

  Freddie shouted, “Oh, yes! Definite 10! Look at her!”

  I was incensed. Filled with rage, yes, but the word “incensed” has a deeper meaning. It was first used to describe fire-breathing animals on medieval coats of arms—and that’s exactly how I felt right then, like I wanted to breathe fire and burn their aggressive laughter right up in smoke.

  I remembered my own photo in the student handbook when I was a first year. I had had my picture taken on the first day, wearing something my mother had put together for me, something between Little House on the Prairie and British manor attire. Whatever it was, it was definitely dour and of a previous century, and only made worse with doily lace. I beamed with wide-eyed terror up and off the page. I hadn’t looked at the student handbook photos this year, but I could imagine so many of the girls, and the boys, for that matter, looking up at Freddie and his crew with the same expression.